Monday, May 11, 2009

This Sunday night at the Royce Gallery

PAMELA Z PRODUCTIONS presents:

room: PIPES

Sunday May 17, 2009, 8pm

Jane Rigler (flutes, electronics, and interactive video)
Polly Moller (flutes and voice)
with Pamela Z (voice & electronics)

ROYCE GALLERY
2901 Mariposa Street (between Harrison & Alabama), San Francisco.
Admission is $10
Tickets available at the door or through PayPal
www.pamelaz.com/room.html



Friday, May 08, 2009

Another place to read stuff I've written

I'm excited to announce I'm now a Contributing Editor at Sequenza21, the contemporary music blog. I'll be reporting on new music goings-on in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Monday, May 04, 2009

Flower Moon concert Thursday night in SF

My Full Moon Concert Series which I'm curating for Outsound Presents and the Luggage Store Gallery moves on to the Flower Moon concert this Thursday night. Last month's Wind Moon was my favorite so far. Running out of chairs is really, really cool.

The duo of Theresa Wong and Kanoko Nishi goes on at 8 pm , and Vorticella plays at 9 pm. The gallery is located at 1007 Market Street at Sixth Street, San Francisco and admission is $6.00 - $10.00 sliding scale.

THE PROGRAM:

1. Wong & Nishi will perform improvisations on koto and cello/voice.

INTERMISSION

2. Flowers are of many colors and forms, some are conspicuous, some are barely noticeable, but all simultaneously represent both the potential for new life and the fragility of existence. By working with sonic textures that range from the extravagant to the subtle, Vorticella illustrates the vibrancy of rebirth and the ever changing nature of the environment and our relationship to it.

PERFORMER BIOS

Theresa Wong is a cellist and vocalist based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Her current work weaves together the areas of improvisation, composition, song forms, video, performance art and large scale performance pieces. After studying design, she became interested in an art form which would unite the visual arts with sound and performance. Her work has been included in the Unlimited 21 Festival in Wels, Austria, Fondation Cartier in Paris, the Other Minds Brink series in San Francisco, the Radio France broadcast, "A L'improviste", the Seattle Improvised Music Festival and at The Stone in New York City. She has collaborated and performed with such artists as Fred Frith, Joelle Leandre, Gianni Gebbia, Luciano Chessa, ROVA Saxophone Quartet, Ellen Fullman, Carla Kihlstedt and Joan Jeanrenaud. Theresa completed an MFA in performance at Mills College and is currently a resident artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts.

Kanoko Nishi is an improvising performer, currently residing in Oakland, CA. She has received a BA in Classical Piano Performance from Mills College, and beside working as a pianist for performances of new and contemporary compositions for piano, she has also collaborated and performed with various musicians, dancers, poets and visual artists, improvising on her second instrument, koto (Japanese 13-string zither).

Vorticella are inverted bell-shaped ciliates. Each of these single-celled organisms has a separate, anchored stalk. Some are grouped as colonies, but because each Vorticella has its own individual stalk it can detach from the cluster at any time. We are a complex sound generating entity bearing a strong resemblance to the Vorticella.

Krystyna Bobrowski is a sound artist, composer and musician. In addition to French horn she plays acoustic and electronic instruments of her own design. Her collection of original instruments includes bull kelp horns, prepared amplified rocking chairs, leaf speakers, Gliss Glass and the Sliding Speaker Instrument.

Erin Espeland has been an improvisational cellist for over 20 years. She uses unconventional techniques to generate interesting sounds from this instrument. She has played in ensembles throughout northern California, with performances ranging from John Cage festivals to parades.

Brenda Hutchinson, composer and sound artist, has been making sounds and singing into one end of a 9 1/2 foot Long Tube for the past 18 years. She has developed a more bionic, electronically enhanced version of the Long Tube that she uses for both solo performance and to improvise with other musicians.

Karen Stackpole is a drummer/percussionist who specializes in gongs and metals in particular. She has a penchant for subtle sounds and experimental music, playing both solo and in collaboration with others. Over the years she has managed to amass a wide collection of traditional and exotic percussion instruments as well as an arsenal of found objects that she uses to create some truly unique soundscapes.